TALES FROM THE PIZZA POOL

School in our town gets canceled because Venus entered retrograde or a snapping turtle crossed an intersection. Yesterday it was the heat.

I’m not saying I want our teachers and children parboiled. What I’m saying is I am a parent with offspring whose vitality levels in all things, from hilarity and love to despair, loathing, and emotional terrorism make you feel like you’re getting into a series of about one to three hundred mild-to-moderate car accidents per day. We are about to engage this car accident routine for the whole summer, and there having been only three days of school left, I had hoped to sit silently rocking in a corner for a few hours.

Nosir: we shall wake and stretch and begin hitting. We shall stumble downstairs naked and demand something other than pancakes and all the other things we’ve ever had to eat. As we pull on our underpants complainingly about twenty minutes into the breakfast mutiny, we shall sing loud songs about what rhymes with Venus. Then we shall set about the TV lobby: loudly, urgently, in rapid-fire succession: all the reasons we should watch television until we die, including that it’s “educational, mom!”

All this while mom takes an actual three hours to pack a bag for the intended destination, which is the lake. To begin, no one can ever find a matching pair of any footwear, so there’s at least twenty minutes sunk into locating gear for four feet in total,—taking into account the “corroded toe” my son still has from so many stubbings it may one day light on fire like a match—so that there is a little extra room in that left side— or is it right? No matter, he reverses the sides every time anyway. What lake water will do for the corroded toe is a mystery, though I tend to believe in the healing properties of any of the Finger Lakes, if only because it feels there is little to believe in these days, and lakes seem a solid choice.

Bathing suits? Nah, no one can find those either and if we can they are mildewed or in a pile intended for some type of largely ineffectual washing. At hand, what we have is clothes that bear the faded emblem of the “quick dry” sticker from Target, which will do nicely. Three pairs of those, bottom and top, for each kid, and we’ve got a start (there is often complaint of chaffing, or tags, or tightness, or the wrong design concept. The flowered long-sleeve UV-blocking shirt is worlds more desirable, for example, than the flamingo one, for both children, and some serious footwork will have to happen as we exit the car into the park in order to distract whichever one doesn’t score the flowery top while the other dons it.)

Don’t even get me started on the food. My children are so invested in developing identities that aren’t mine that I think they would rather eat pine boughs than a sandwich I made. If healthy identity is formed by reverse food tyranny, they’re going to have stronger senses of self than the people in the Guess Who game. So I put old popcorn, dark cherries, a couple protein bars, some bananas, a bag of cashews, and graham crackers in the now-43-lb tote. None of these but the graham crackers and six of the cashews will get eaten.

When we arrive to the park, I get to the NYStateParks pass-reading machine and our pass won’t load on my phone, as usual, even though I pre-loaded it, because it has seen fit to refresh itself for no reason since one half mile earlier. It is at this juncture that one of the children starts yelling that he does not want to be here. Anywhere but here. We were here yesterday (he had a marvelous time swimming and shivering in the lake water while the weather all around was in the upper nineties and humid).

I do all the things. I explain, I reassure, I paw at the screen of my non-loading park pass while people in the car behind us in line wonder whether I can read. The child continues to yell. It is then that I remember I told him today would be his turn, and that the problem isn’t the location but that his sister picked it yesterday and it is HIS TURN.

So we pull a U-turn around the pointless phone-reading kiosk and head back out onto Route 89, where it takes a while to get a break in traffic to make a left turn, which is dicey because now both kids are crying and kicking their seats. I could be instructing them in how this is little kid behavior, not six-year-old stuff, but there is too little brainspace left and I’ve got to get the phone to load the pass before we turn into the lot across the street, where child B wishes most to go, so he can walk up the gorge to his favorite place to play in the water, where there is zero shade.

I have sunscreen with us, and child A has the long-sleeved flowery UV-blocking shirt, but as for the general of this attack, he will not wear sunscreen or a hat, and getting a shirt on him has to be done while in full-on distraction mode: he will only get dressed if he’s on his way to a lawnmower or a tv show, and you have to kind of hold his clothes up and out like the hoops that dolphins jump through so that he can go into and through them on the way to where he will be. No matter, he doesn’t burn easily and we have time to rub some sunscreen onto him while he’s playing with rocks or something in a little bit, when we get up to the designated spot.

The parks pass loads by some miracle right as we pull up to the second kiosk, and the children are out of the car and sprinting towards sheer walls above the lower waterfall before I can get my sweaty thighs unstuck from the vinyl of the car seat.

What I wish I could tell strangers, who see half-naked, uncombed children sprinting towards their certain deaths while a tired and distracted-looking mother drags supplies behind, is that these kids are expert gorge-goers; they’ve been doing gorges since they were 18 months old and have never once slipped and hit their heads. They know where all the trails are and how to get to the crevice in the stream where we are most likely to be able to build a little sitting pool, and they prefer bare feet for all of it. “Sure-footed,” they started saying, almost as a mantra, around two years old, in response to their father’s admonition that they take their feet seriously and place them with thoughtful, receptive assertiveness.

And they are: sure-footed. Nobody else knows this, of course, among the hundreds of tourists visiting the gorge as well this day, so the ambulating laundry pile of a parent struggling along behind the streaking children just looks dopey and unprepared. To be fair, this is true.

So anyway, in the switch from the lake plan to the gorge plan, I decide that the 43-lb beach bag will be unnecessary. And as the children sprint towards trails and waterfalls, it seems smart to “just grab the basics” and tuck them into a smaller pack that I can more easily haul the half mile up the trail to where I know they’re headed. I have to catch up soon, after all, despite the kids’ general gorge-savvy, because what if Bad Strangers, or Water Snakes, or they forget the poison ivy carpet on the left a few hundred yards in? So I shove the cashews and graham crackers and a water and a few extra clothes into the pack. We won’t be here long, right? We’ll surely end up at the lake across the street soon enough, when we all get too hot to bear the gorge any longer.

Not so: we end up staying in that gorge for more than four hours. One of the rules when twins are playing relatively happily, aka “pre-fighting,” is that you don’t move a muscle. You stare into space and enjoy your inner freedom. So, second after second, minute after minute, hour after hour, we end up staying right where we are. It helps, of course, that I’ve become a bit of a dogsbody for dam-building, and have been able to stop up their favorite mini-waterfall wedge-shaped area with a line of pretty heavy rocks, all hauled precariously above my sandaled toes.

We even acquire some extended family members, on account of the heat, family who felt the only thing worse than being out in this heat would be to skulk around at home in the AC: so, two grandparents and an auntie show up about an hour into our tenure as dam residents. They promptly help the children name the pool we’ve built “the pizza pool” because it is wedge-shaped and alliteration usually catches the ears of self-respecting six-year-olds.

The relatives gamely wade in, fording the river to the side where there is a strip of shade, and set up their portable chairs for a nice view of the whole shebang, which is mostly kids doing “canon balls” into twelve inches of water in the pizza pool and three kinds of swallows dipping by in elaborate insect-finding swoops. Also, a mother squelching back and forth between the bank and the pool to try and shove cashews into the mouths of the children at points in their imaginative play where they could use “chickie treats” or “rat poop”— whatever is most likely to get their tiny hypoglycemic maws laughing and open enough for direly needed calories.

We eat, of course, the extended family’s food. We use, of course, their sunscreen. We drink, of course, the chilled seltzer and coconut water they packed in, instead of the melting snacks (most of which are still in the 43-lb beach-bag back in the car) and the sort-of-scrubbed out thermos of warm tap water that the parental unit managed.

And when the extended family members are foolish enough to stand up from their porta-chairs for the purpose of unzipping the lower legs of their quick-dry pants or viewing birds, the children squirrel the chairs away to become stream-floating debris of a coveted point value. They sail the chairs as misfit boats down a stretch of stream over and over, often sinking them into the pizza pool, where they can work on their road rash and corroded toes most easily.

Child B acquires a sunburn, since he is much faster than his mother and has taken it on as a particular challenge and a point of pride that he will not wear sunscreen, that disgusting stuff. Neither will he don the flamingo UV-blocking shirt, which has become damp and he knows will be difficult to put on, in the same way that getting tight jeans onto a wet body is difficult: which is to say homicidally so.

He’s not wrong, which is usually the problem with my children.

In fact, it is this very ungovernability of my children that delivers us to some of our best adventures, our most valued memories. There was the time, for example, neither child would wear a Halloween costume for our harvest party, so we just called my daughter in a sparkly dress “Starry Night,” and my son in his tighty-whities “Boris Johnson: the college years.”

Would it have been fine and lovely if I’d prevailed and we’d parked across the street and had a “lake day,” where the water is deeper and there is more shade? Sure, of course.

But there’s something about moving water— and kids know it— something about how it’s never the same water, and it’s always the same water; how it’s always moving but never goes away; how we can be in it, and in it, and in it, and feel very much like the same people, yet also as if we might have shifted in some relevant way, by receiving the movement of the water and the swallows and the sky. We become fuller by knowing, despite and because of these ceaseless motions, that all are still there, doing the relentlessly renewing work of becoming more themselves.